Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, Influential Reform Theologian, Dies at 91

Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, a leading theologian of Reform Judaism who argued that the modern emphasis on reason and self-imposed ethics needed the undergirding of what he called a covenantal relationship with God, died on Jan. 22 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 91.

His daughter Nan Langowitz said the cause was congestive heart failure.

When Rabbi Borowitz began publishing his groundbreaking philosophical works in the 1960s, liberal and humanistic Jewish thinkers who had stressed the pre-eminence of reason as the basis for human values were in something of a postwar crisis.

That crisis was described by David Ellenson, a former president and chancellor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the movement’s multicampus seminary, in a 70th-birthday tribute to Rabbi Borowitz. “The utter evil of the Holocaust has forced Jews and others to a radical reassessment of the humanistic heritage of the Enlightenment,” he said, “and compelled many of them to face the limits of tolerance and relativism.”

Although attracted to the philosopher Martin Buber’s emphasis on the ethical autonomy of the individual, Rabbi Borowitz, according to Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, argued that a balance must be struck between the modern desire for independently shaping a person’s religious ideas and the traditional vision of a commanding God directing a person’s ethics and practices.

A personal faith, Rabbi Borowitz wrote, needs to be fundamentally influenced by the Covenant — the pact between God and Jews that they will be his treasured people if they follow the Torah — so that “whatever issues from its depths will have authentic Jewish character.”

Yet he did not argue for a literal Orthodox adherence to Torah commandments and observances. Reform Judaism is, after all, perhaps the most flexible of the Jewish denominations. Instead, he proposed that ethical and religious choices be determined through an internal conversation with God. He also encouraged the discipline of regular religious practice, like daily prayer and study, as well as taking action to better the lives of other human beings.

He would charge his future rabbis with these words:

“We need to guide Jews in the difficult art of maintaining an intense loyalty to Jewish tradition, that of living by a deeply Jewish faith, while freely assessing the virtues of the various modern ways of interpreting it — and within this continuous dialectic process to find the personal and conceptual integrity of what it means to be a modern Jew.”

Although he introduced the concept of “covenant theology” in an article in the magazine Commentary in 1961, the fullest expression of his philosophy came in his 1991 book, “Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew.”

Rabbi Borowitz was also the founding editor of the intellectual and public affairs magazine Sh’ma, which he shepherded from 1970 to 1993.

As significant as the 17 books and myriad articles he published was his role as a charismatic teacher for half a century at Hebrew Union College’s Manhattan campus, where he had a profound influence on generations of Reform rabbis through courses like “Modern Jewish Thought.” In his eulogy, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman said of Rabbi Borowitz, “He brought God into the curriculum, indeed into the classroom.”

In recent years, Rabbi Borowitz, tall and with a sturdy voice, also taught a weekly Saturday morning Torah class at Temple Sinai in Stamford.

“He was a phenomenal educator,” said Alan Septimus, a Westchester businessman who took the class for the past eight years. “His unique quality was his ability to explain theological questions and responses in very understandable terms.”

Eugene Borowitz was born on Feb. 20, 1924, in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents. He liked to say he was a product of intermarriage — that of his paternal great-grandparents — between two great traditions of Judaism: the cerebral Lithuanian tradition and the more emotional Hasidic tradition.

He attended high school in Columbus and then enrolled at Ohio State University as a commuter student. He majored in philosophy, and in his classes he became aware of what he called the collapse of secular ethics.

After graduation, in 1943, he enrolled at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he was ordained in 1948 and received a doctorate in Hebrew letters in 1952. He also had a doctorate in religion from Columbia University Teachers College.

It was a time of intellectual ferment, of grappling both with the Holocaust and with the heady Zionistic success in establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel after almost 2,000 years, and Rabbi Borowitz’s ideas may have been kindled in that climate. During his senior year at Hebrew Union, he married Estelle Covel.

Mrs. Borowitz, a psychologist, died in 2004. In addition to Ms. Langowitz, he is survived by two other daughters, Lisa and Drucy; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

In 1964, in response to an appeal by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Borowitz and a group of colleagues traveled to St. Augustine, Fla., for a civil rights demonstration and were arrested — 16 Reform rabbis in all — for praying in an integrated group and for sitting down with young black people in a restaurant. The episode was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times.

“We came because we could not stand silently by our brother’s blood,” the rabbis said in a letter from jail, written mainly by Rabbi Borowitz, before invoking the silence that greeted the Nazi crematories. “We came because we know that second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”

Rabbi Borowitz was not immune to changing his views. While he originally opposed ordination of gay and lesbian students, he later “confessed,” as he put it, that he regretted that stance and, before an assembly of other rabbis, symbolically signed a diploma for a gay Hebrew Union graduate.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, Influential Reform Theologian, Dies at 91. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe